Community for the most part plays like a traditional sitcom, but there’s one primary aspect that keeps it away from being another exmaple of the old genre: continuity. Due primarily, I would guess, to the way syndication works, sitcoms just don’t have a background where what happens in one episode stays relevant in the next. The most important sitcom of my generation, The Simpsons, will make jokes about past episodes but would never base a plotline around it. The two-part “Who Shot Mr. Burns” episodes were noteworthy because things didn’t resolve in a quick 22-minutes.
“Live in your car, living in your car, you are living in your car!!!!”
“Randy can be either a boy or a girl’s name.”
“TV never abused and insulted me — unless you count Cop Rock.”
“You don’t sit on a toilet like that until you’ve left the material world behind.”
“Sometimes I like to pour hot cocoa mix into cold milk and pretend it’s chocolate milk. Icall it special drink.” “someday you will know it by it’s real name: diabetes”
“A picnic blanket! Genius. I was just gonna lay down newspaper.”
“That song was disrespectful to me, and the definition of rhyme scheme.”
-Patton Oswalt! Holy shit.
“He’s like E.T. He crashed in my place. We’re friends now… it’s good for me but it’s bad for him.”
-Turns out Ken Jeong was an actual doctor. Never would’ve guessed considering how great he is at acting.
“Think how much happier the Jeffersons were than that family on Good Times” – “Yeah but they had good times…”
But especially in the wake of Arrested Development, it’s become a more important part of shows, and Community is riding the balance between acknowledging what’s happened before it and not becoming a relatively funny soap opera better than most shows out there. This week’s episode was a nice mix of bringing back unresolved issues from previous episodes, but not basing the entire plot around them. It didn’t have quite as many amazing gags as last week but does seem to be getting sharper with one-liners in a way that reminds me of the first couple seasons of 30 Rock. It’s not naturalistic dialogue by any means, but the actors are good enough to sell what’s frequently a series of one-liners.
The main plot of “Home Economics” in fact has little to do with previous shows, aside from the general unease it’s hard not to have with Joel’s backstory. Not its implausability, that’s fine, but just where he lives, what else he’s doing and what the rest of his life outside of Community is like. Apparently, that life is pretty terrible. Jeff has begun living in his car due to a largely unexplained fight with his landlord (probably safe to assume not paying rent is the cause), and ends up living with Abed after his car/house is unceremoniously towed away.
Britta is at first delighted, then disgusted by Joel’s change of lifestyle. Apparently he really is made happy by what he owns, and she convinces him through somewhat credulity-straining means to go back to it.
Meanwhile, Troy asks Annie for help in taking a girl out on a date, despite the obvious, all-consuming crush she has on him. She helps him out with the date even though it only promises to make her sad and angry, because that’s what you do when you have an all-consuming crush on someone, i.e. act stupid. Shirley helps her break out of this by the end of the episode, and she takes back the picnic blanket she so eagerly loaned Troy in the first scene. The relationship between the two of them had been building for a while and it’s nice to see it develop in some way. Troy’s still obvlivious, but with any luck the will they/won’t they plotline will close up soon for better or worse. It’s funny, but I’d like to believe Community is better than making that the pair’s schtick season after season.
In its c-plot, Chevy Chase is again off in his own world writing music, but this time it’s in a band with Britta’s ex from a couple episodes back. The pair writes a song bashing Britta, then soon breaks up over song-writing credits. The episode ends with a somewhat amusing song hating on Chase rather than Britta, which isn’t quite as funny as it could be but still gets the job done.
Without all the theatrics of last week, “Home Economics” may seem a little bit more conventional, but it’s just as funny. All of its loose ends tied up VERY fast, even in the world of presto chango sitcoms, but didn’t end up affecting the episode too much. Since the first few acts were so jam-packed (to the point where there was no theme song), it’s hard to blame them for ending things so quickly. Five more minutes of time and pacing to end things a little more naturalistically would’ve taken the episode over the top, but in any case it was still pretty damn great. The show’s reached a new plateau with this and the last episode, let’s hope they mantain it.
Random Thoughts:
“Before AIDS sex was like shaking hands.” – “Hence AIDS…”